Accommodation: What we need

The basic standard for any accommodation would be that its warm, dry, safe, secure, accessible to local amenities and public transport links (or appropriate alternatives), with an environment that facilitates and allows healthy living and provides appropriate space and facilities for the number of people who are permanent residents within the household.

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Using Planning Reform to make it even easier to build houses is the obvious solution for a political class that always takes the easy option without view of the consequences first

Politicians are no longer big enough to tackle or even attempt to address issues that they cannot be sure they can control. It is a fool’s game.

Government has been blighted by very normal, overly ambitious people styling themselves as public leaders, whose greatest skill is sniffing out and repelling any meaningful response to the issues and actions that carry the greatest risk to themselves.

The irony should not be lost on many, that if governments were to apply themselves fully and without compromise to addressing the issues of their time and without fear of any electoral risk to them by doing so, they would have done all they need to get re-elected with a decent majority at the end of their 5-year-term.

Regrettably – and to the continued cost of the British Public, this is not how our politicians roll.

Our politicians take the easy and politically lazy route to managing public policy. They deal with issues in isolation, giving little or no consideration to the impact upon other areas of public policy. They focus on the consequences of their actions only for themselves when they should be prioritising the consequences for us all.

The suggestion that using Planning Reform to make it easier to build houses will solve the housing crisis is nothing more than the siren call of greed. A call to action that will line the pockets of the same financiers, builders and political chums as always, whilst people whose lives are being increasingly destroyed by the exponential growth of personal and private debt also see countless other factors that give quality to their lives smashed unnecessarily upon these hidden rocks.

No human being can be in two places at once. Therefore, no human being needs two places in which to live.

Just as is the case in every other part of life, there is ‘enough for everyone’s need, but never enough for everyone’s greed’.

Money, created by a monetary and financial system that is only fair and equitable to those who have no need for any more of it, should not enable anyone to obtain more than they need to facilitate anything more than the requirements of day-to-day function or living. Certainly not when doing so comes at the cost of preventing others with less from having the same.

With a growing population, there will always be a relative need for the country to build new homes. But increasing home building exponentially, just so the whims of some can be met and the profiteering and greed of others can be fed is no solution to a problem that can be solved politically with better, more appropriate and fairer use of resources that already exist.

You never see house prices fall in the area where a new development is built. But you do see problems with flooding. You see the negative impact on infrastructure like roads, schools and GPs Surgeries.

Excessive building leads to a fall in the quality of life for countless numbers of people, many of them everyday, low-wage people who grew up locally. Real people who are being pushed out by deliberately engineered inflation meaning that the new houses the government and media tells us are being built to help them will continue to be the prized lifetime asset they will never be able to afford.

Whilst the term ‘Reset’ or ‘Great Reset’ has been adopted by both the World Economic Forum and by those who love to hate them, there is indeed no better term that can be used to describe what needs to happen to the UKs and the International Monetary and Financial systems so that life and the ability of everyone to live it becomes something that we all can financially afford.

The disproportionate value of homes, relative to what they are genuinely worth could quickly be addressed to a significant degree by a revaluation and rebalancing of the way money is used and manipulated and how the economy works.

But money itself has to be viewed as nothing more than the unit of exchange that it is, rather than the god-like ‘thing’ that greed and selfishness has allowed it to become.

There are already a range of devices that the Government could use to address second and multiple home ownership. This would immediately improve housing stock availability and remove the need for housebuilding to increase or to continue in the forms that are destroying local communities and the environments around them – when there already exists a much more appropriate choice.

Yet our politicians will not use taxation or bans on multiple home ownership, because it would mean wading through a political minefield that they consider too risky to their chances of re-election. They are therefore deemed to be actions that they must do everything to avoid.

By making public policy decisions in this way, our politicians are failing to do the right thing for the people they represent. Meanwhile they are continually creating more and more troublesome consequences for everyone, which they will then once again do everything to avoid.

This lack of leadership in government and the rejection of responsibility by this political class means that the basics of life for many are simply too expensive to afford.

Changing Politics for the better Pt 4: Housing

If a housing shortage forms the basis of the housing problem, why is it that every time a new estate is built, prices of those new-builds and the homes in the communities around them don’t simply go down?

That is the question that we must answer, because the answer is not to keep on building and concreting over our fields and what used to be our green and pleasant land.
The UK is pretty much alone in prizing property, its value and the accumulation of personal private wealth off the back of it in the way that we do.
With disproportionate buying power having enabled exceptional overvaluing at the top of the market and a money-generating culture having made it normal for doing everything on credit to be normal and therefore for debt to be farmed, the housing market has become inflated over and over many different times to the point where the value of a home is disproportionately higher than the average salary in each and every British Town.
At the top end of the scale, people have so much money that they can afford to own or purchase more than one. Second homes have squeezed many of our rural and seaside communities, where low priced homes for life have been absorbed into a weekend and holiday market, for no better reason than just because.
There is no reason to be down on those who are successful, if that success is not generated by riding off the back of others or then used to disadvatage others lives.
Yet a system that not only allows, but actively encourages property ownership as a way of generating income for financiers and builders, without regulating ownership and disincentivising under use can only succeed by making housing a growing problem for everyone else.
A Government working for all MUST change the way that the housing problem is being addressed.
It could begin by doing the following:
  • Stop the push for green-field building.
  • Regulate builders and the financiers working in the property market .
  • Make unnecessary profiteering on house building and community property illegal.
  • Bring in a higher level stamp duty or purchase tax on second homes.
  • Introduce higher tiers of council tax for second or multiple homes.
  • Use a penality system to discourage houses in rural areas and by the seaside being left empty for days or even weeks at a time.
  • Give local communities a real and meaningful veto over large scale development and not leave it up to appeals to the Secretary of State before a planning decision can be put on hold

A housing market correction will be nothing to do with Brexit, Gov’. A lot of people would actually like a 33%+ drop in prices and those who would suffer could and should have been helped by preventative regulation long before now

images (12)Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England has become a divisive figure, despite some protestations that his efforts are the only thing keeping the Government sound.

Appointed by George Osborne, some would have been surprised by the recent extension of his Contract, but less so by his intervention this week suggesting that there could be a housing market crash, post ‘no deal Brexit’. He has form when it comes to ‘Project Fear’ after all.

First things first. Bank of England Governor or not, nobody has the level of knowledge of the future that it would take to make a credible prediction of this kind with such clarity and yes, conviction too.

The great irony surrounding Mr Carney’s latest projection is that a great many people throughout the UK would not only welcome a drop in house prices of the kind he has suggested. They would probably go out and celebrate it too.

A correction in the massively over-inflated UK housing market is long overdue and We can be sure that with the experience and background that Mr Carney has, he jolly well knows this too. It’s just very easy right now for him to link anything bad with the all absorbing process and negativity being peddled about Brexit by key people who should really behave better.

Houses in this country have been vastly overpriced for an entire generation already.

The gap between income level and the borrowing necessary to secure home ownership grows exponentially every year.

Yet the people who could do more to bring into check the out of control monster that is the housing market – that’s people like Mr Carney himself, have long since given up on trying to tackle the issues creating the housing crisis head on.

They instead rely on hollow excuses to create policies like aggressive house building which won’t actually solve the housing problem through our Country but will certainly ensure that the green parts of England will soon never ever look quite the same.

Ask yourself this. When was the last time you experienced house prices falling in your local area when a new and probably large housing development was built nearby?

No. House prices are drastically over-inflated and it is only because so little meaningful regulation is placed upon the banks and finance houses, that their unbridled processes of money creation have been allowed to build and consolidate a mountain of private debt for the general population.

Meanwhile those responsible for what is to them a distant reality live gilded lives which are only possible because they have been allowed to create a culture of financial oppression for others which is progressively enslaving the masses whilst the benefits push up prices for everyone but only deliver benefits for the few.

The false world which has been created by the work of the financial sector really is a wonder to behold. But it is not real and it is dangerously dependent upon the security and stability of the financial markets which are intrinsically linked to the wants and whims of traders and government appointed officials, leaving little in terms of cushioning or a safety net located in between.

The correction in the housing market for which many are now waiting could as easily come after a no deal Brexit as it could at any other time.

But if the housing market correction should appear to arrive at the time of our leaving the EU, it will not be because of the decision made in the European Referendum in 2016.

It will do so because of the catalystic behaviour of officials and politicians in the European Union and our Government who have and continue to resist the democratic decision of the British People to complete Brexit.

They have worked tirelessly instead for a mismatch and mess of measures which cannot possibly work as a solution as it has always been their aim to place the UK within a mythical no mans land between us and the EU which could never actually exist, even though they would continually tell us all that it was so.

 

image thanks to thetimes.co.uk